Author: Andrew Sullivan

Have We Outgrown Growing Up? Ctd

A reader chuckles at the notion that high culture has ceased to exist:

Responding to A.O. Scott’s essay, Freddie writes:

There is no such thing as high culture. There probably never was but even if there was it died long, long ago. Outside of your fantasies, there is no group of intellectual elitists looking down their noses at the music or TV you like. Such people do not exist.

I find that amusing, considering this article from yesterday’s issue of the New Yorker on the resurgence of the Frankfurt School (probably history’s foremost critics of “low culture”). One passage:

Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – presiding over unprecedented monopolies. Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive. Search engines guide you away from peculiar words. (“Did you mean . . . ?”) Headlines have an authoritarian bark (“This Map of Planes in the Air Right Now Will Blow Your Mind”). “Most Read” lists at the top of Web sites imply that you should read the same stories everyone else is reading. Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.

I agree with Freddie’s claim that lovers of pop culture are not “an oppressed and denigrated minority,” but to say that there is “no group of intellectual elitists looking down their nose at the music or TV you like” is just plain wrong. As a PhD student in Communications, I sit in classes with some of them on a daily basis.

Another is skeptical of the entire end-of-adulthood argument:

I’m sure A.O. Scott wrote that piece with the best of intentions, but it amounts to a navel-gazing bout of bullshit.

If we have reached the “death of adulthood,” it’s because “adulthood” has in large part been a mirage. You don’t magically become “adult” by dressing a certain way, or having a certain amount of money, or going to a certain club, or deciding that you need Brahms instead of early Beatles.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that the adults I trusted growing up weren’t mystical sages. They were winging it. Children need older authority figures, but those figures are only doing the best they can. As you age, you still put away “childish” (I would say immature) things – unreasonable expectations of fame or wealth, the ache and burning of teenage love, and most of all, the belief that being a certain age magically mutates you into a separate “adult” creature.

Count me in with Lewis. If you’re a 50-year-old guy worrying about the culture of being “adult,” you’re exhibiting the type of immature mindset of a 12-year-old, when you thought “acting grown up” was terribly important. I like Marvel movies; I’m also a divorced 30-something working a corporate day job in a law firm. I’m sure as hell not going to devote all of my time to reading Russian philosophers at night to satisfy someone else’s illusion.

Another is on the same page:

I think we’re finally allowed to admit that in a lot of ways, we never grow up. Think about it: do we ever stop behaving like we’re in high school? Workplace hierarchies are similar to the ways we grouped or were grouped as teenagers. There’s still bullying and peer pressure. We wear “uniforms” that fit the environment, and our time is scheduled when it isn’t outright micro-managed. On a personal level, we still have our cliques that include or exclude based on the same ridiculous set of preferences and prejudices that we picked up as older teens or young “adults.”

My parents, born of the Depression, were “grown ups.” But my memories of their lives, and the lives of their friends, aren’t so different from what I see in my peers or in the peers of my adult kids. The exterior that we’re willing to show has changed, and our parents and grandparents were willing to put up with a lot more discomfort than we are. But there was never an adulthood. There was just the extent to which people were willing to conform. Which today, isn’t so much.

Meanwhile, a 23-year-old reader notes that disposable entertainments have a long pedigree:

Every generation has produced pop culture that wasn’t considered respectable and wasn’t discussed or analyzed in a serious way. Bawdy saloon and beer-hall tunes thrived in the age of Wagner and Strauss, dime pulp novels outsold Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and five-cent peep shows brought in viewers in numbers that would rival any superhero movie today. I think we’re at a pop-culture moment where we no longer put away things we enjoy simply because we fear looking childish. I’m not ashamed to admit that I have been moved to tears both by Harry Potter and Wilfred Owen. To argue that a vast swath of Americans don’t value “pleasures based on work, ambiguity, or difficulty” because adults are reading The Hunger Games is to construct a straw man of staggering size.

I agree with Freddie that being an adult has to do with your ability to be a productive human who cares for others and is thoughtful and self-aware both about one’s actions and place in the world. As far as I’m aware, seeing The Avengers is not an impediment to that.

Face Of The Day

Muslims Protest IS Violence

A young man chants as Muslims gather for Friday prayers on the street outside the Mevlana Moschee on a nation-wide action day to protest against the Islamic State (IS) on September 19, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. Muslims across cities in Germany followed a call by the country’s Central Council of Muslims to protest against the ongoing violence by IS fighters in Syria and Iraq. By Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

Paternity Pays, Ctd

A reader makes a nuanced argument:

There are some real problems with Miller’s position. Men increase their hours, while women reduce theirs. As a rather natural consequence, men get bonuses and raises. This happens when one works longer hours and work harder. Women want to work less. As a rather natural consequence, women have trained employers to be suspicious of women after they have children. Even if a particular women works longer and harder, she is tainted by the general reaction. I don’t think this is the fault of employers. Employers have the rather sad duty of living in the real world where economic decisions actually matter and have consequences. Thus, they are typically a conservative (in the traditional sense) bunch who go with what mostly happens: a women will work less and want more time off.

What we really need to do is to stop being a society that demands that the adults in a two-parent family both work. We need to re-organize back to the idea of one parent works to support the family and one stays home. We should be egalitarian about which one stays home and encourage fathers to stay home as much as mothers.

But we need to give employers both the message that the working parent can be fully counted upon to work and the stay-at-home parent can take on the real responsibility of raising children (which is wildly hard work, so much so that I would never, ever do it; even the sight of a day care center is enough to make me queasy).

The easiest way to do this is to credit the stay-at-home parent with Social Security credits equal to the working parent. The bonus for society would be fewer workers, higher wages for the remaining workers, and neighborhoods with adults home to keep track of the children. The time from after school to parents return is the most dangerous time for children and, with a parent home, that would end. Not only do studies clearly show children do better in two parent families (the sex of the two parents really doesn’t matter), but that children do even better in two-parent families where one stays home and takes on the daily task of raising the children (please see: Family Structure and Children’s Health in the United States: Findings From the National Health Interview Survey, 2001­ – 2007, published by the CDC).

For far, far too long, we’ve allowed our society to be organized to optimize what is best for corporate profits. We need to organize around what is best for our citizens, particularly families. I write this as a single gay man without children, but someone who fully recognizes a society that puts children and families first will be a healthier one.

Flowery Speech

dish_pansies

Robin Lane Fox surveys a history of plants in poetry:

Surprisingly, the poetry of flowers is often patchy and ill-informed. None of the ancient Greek poets mentions the brilliant wild tulips that run like red rivers through parts of the Greek landscape. Chinese poets focus on a narrow canon of flowers, soaked in symbolism and hidden meanings. They say nothing about the heavenly wild flora, the superb shrubs and mountain flowers that have transformed Western gardens since their collection and introduction by Europeans. John Milton’s poetry describes bunches of flowers that would never flower during one and the same season. No gardener, especially in Britain this year, would agree that April is “the cruellest month” and in no gardens or landscapes known to me does April breed “lilacs out of the dead land,” least of all on the American East Coast within range of the young T.S. Eliot.

The exceptions prove the rule. Sappho had an engagingly sharp eye for the flowers of her native Lesbos, including milk-white pansies. Theocritus’ poems, some three hundred years later, include particular flowers from his second home, Cos, and also from Sicily or southern Italy that he probably therefore visited. Shakespeare of course observed and included many flowers, and D.H. Lawrence was also unusually alert, not just to dark blue Bavarian gentians but to the dark trunks of almond trees, which he acutely observed during his time in Taormina and rendered in poetry there. William Cowper could garden well, but among living poets, only James Fenton has had a garden that challenged expert gardeners with its assemblages of snowdrops and highly unusual plants.

(Photo by Susanne Nilsson)

What A Drip

Colin Marshall introduces Dripped, an animated tribute to Jackson Pollack:

In its 1940s New York City setting, painting-swiping protagonist Jack lives not just to make world-renowned canvasses his own, but a part of him. When he gets these works of art back to his apartment, he doesn’t even consider selling them; instead, he chews and swallows them, thus enabling him to assume in body the forms and colors famously expressed in paint on their surfaces. We are what we eat, and Jack eats art, but even becoming the art of others ultimately leaves him unsatisfied. Determined to paint and eat a canvas of his own, he finds his stomach can’t handle his work in progress. Thrown into a bout of frustration, an angered Jack tosses one of his paintings to the ground, randomly splattering it with every color at hand. And thus he discovers, in this animated fantasy, the technique that Jackson Pollock would pioneer in reality.

The Collapse Of Arab Civilization?

That’s how Hisham Melhem characterizes the decades-long series of crises that led to state failure in the Arab heartland and the rise of ISIS:

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.

And in his view, neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism is a viable solution, being both “driven by atavistic impulses and a regressive outlook on life that is grounded in a mostly mythologized past”. He concludes:

The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the tumorous creation of an ailing Arab body politic.

Its roots run deep in the badlands of a tormented Arab world that seems to be slouching aimlessly through the darkness. It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It will take us a long time to recover—it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime. My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing at the gates. Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.

Cool Ad Watch

Not cool so much as powerful:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNw-ikgLhS8]

Tim Nudd details the PSA:

With the United Nations General Assembly meeting next week, the world’s leading NGOs—Oxfam, Save the Children, Care, Amnesty and a hundred more—have banded together for a new PSA, directed by [Martin] Stirling, that attempts to capture the horrors being endured by ordinary Syrians on a daily basis. … The stylistic choice of using reverse footage almost becomes a moral choice here—it’s the hook that makes the piece haunting, and shareable, and thus capable of making a difference. The film is the centerpiece in the NGOs’ #WithSyria campaign, which drives viewers to a petition asking the UN Security Council to take next steps to protect civilians.

Stirling’s previous ad calling attention to the plight of Syrian civilians is here.

Maternal Ambivalence

Ann Friedman speaks for a lot of women:

Many women are certain they want kids someday. A smaller number are positive they don’t. But there’s another group that isn’t the subject of many hand-wringing studies or best-selling books: the ambivalent. The ones who vacillate between “I don’t feel compelled to have children” and “What if I regret not having had children?” …

“A lot of women on the fence feel like they should be feeling a deep longing to raise a child, and the truth is they don’t,” says Laura Carroll, author of The Baby Matrix. There’s really no evidence, she says, that women have a biological urge to procreate. Humans are the only animal that can choose whether or not to spawn. When you joke that your ovaries are jumping, it’s really your brain thinking, I’d like to be a mother someday. You’re emotionally — not biologically — processing all those cute baby photos on Instagram.

It would certainly be easier if there were a definitive biological drive pushing all women to become mothers. For most of us, it’s far more complicated than that. “Looking back, I never wanted kids,” says Jill Uchiyama, a 46-year-old filmmaker and teacher. “I think there was a moment when I did, because I was married and because I was so in love with my husband. That was the closest I got to really wanting it to happen. But it wasn’t strong enough to make it happen.”

Vengeance Of The Nerds

Writing in a NYT roundtable on the ascent of geek culture, Freddie accuses certain geeks of defensiveness, complacency, and paranoia:

By any rational measure, the geeks – fans of comic books, science fiction, video games and fantasy – are utterly triumphant. Economically, the genre in the media is dominant, earning billions of dollars a year. Critically, it is celebrated, getting sympathetic reviews in the stuffiest publications and winning national awards. In every meaningful sense, geeks are the overdogs.

For the geeks, this should be a moment of triumph and celebration. And yet instead, the typical geeks today still regard the world as fundamentally hostile to their beloved properties. The 800-pound gorilla still thinks of itself as a 98-pound weakling, and the results are ugly. The recent GamerGate controversy, so thoroughly misogynist and angry, demonstrates the problem with winners self-identifying as losers: once you’ve cast yourself as a victim in your own mind, there’s no need to interrogate your own behavior.

Alyssa nods:

Maybe this is a period of adjustment, and flag-flying geeks and nerds will emerge from this upheaval in a better place. Maybe people will see that the video game industry can survive both expansion and criticism. Maybe “Game of Thrones” fans will recognize that the show’s essence will survive even with fewer naked, threatened women on screen. Maybe the bomb threats will stop. The essence of confidence is the ability to handle critiques and the existence of challengers with grace and security in your own position. If what deBoer is describing is a permanent state, though, then a certain subset of angry geeks will prove themselves to be exactly what the once-dominant culture said they were all along: myopic and insecure.

Feminist writer Laurie Penny shows admirable and constructive empathy in the face of vile, misogynist threats:

Later in [her book Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution], Penny explores the sexism that pervades the digital world where she plays out her politics, laying out in detail the death and rape threats she receives for the crime of being an outspoken woman in the public eye. But she is also sympathetic to the origins of that abuse. “One of the most important things to understand about cybersexism is that it comes from a place of pain,” she writes, an “embattled masculinity” wrought from years of abuse at the hands of peers that for some men manifests itself in a resentment and hatred of women.

But what the boy geeks miss, she argues, is that they are not the only ones who have to deal with harassment or ostracism. Girl geeks like Penny, who spent her adolescence on “the type of chat forums where everyone will pretend you’re a 45-year-old history teacher called George,” experience the same sense of alienation that their male equivalents do.

Meanwhile, Zaheer Ali spotlights an important and growing subset of geek culture:

Today, black nerd culture thrives and continues to shape popular culture in significant ways. Music nerd Questlove serves as music director of one of the flagship late night shows, academics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. inform mainstream discourse about American life and history, Black Twitter establishes the newsworthiness of black lives, and Melissa Harris-Perry’s show on MSNBC, which proudly identifies itself by the hashtag #nerdland, presents a diverse line up in cable news. The voices of black geeks and other marginalized nerds remind us that the best of geek culture provided refuge and inspiration for social misfits and outcasts.

The voices of black geeks and other marginalized nerds remind us that the best of geek culture provided refuge and inspiration for social misfits and outcasts. Mainstreaming in the form of recovering that geek culture is reason to celebrate.